ABUJA, March 29: Nigeria captured former Liberian leader and warlord Charles Taylor on Wednesday and deported him towards Monrovia, where UN peacekeepers were waiting to arrest him on charges of crimes against humanity.

West Africa’s most notorious fugitive was flown out of the northern city of Maiduguri on board a Nigerian presidential jet after customs agents caught him attempting to escape across the border into Cameroon, witnesses said.

A senior police officer said the flight would take Taylor home to Liberia, where United Nations officials have a Security Council mandate to detain him and extradite him to a war crimes court in neighbouring Sierra Leone.

Nigerian Information Minister Frank Nweke told reporters that President Olusegun Obasanjo, who is on a visit to Washington, had ‘ordered the immediate repatriation of Charles Taylor to Liberia’.

A witness said that former president Taylor was arrested when he tried to pass across the Gamboringala border post from Nigeria into Cameroon in a Range Rover jeep carrying diplomatic plates and a large sum of US dollars.

News of Taylor’s arrest came only hours before Obasanjo — facing sharp international criticism for allowing the exiled Liberian leader to disappear from his home in exile — was expected to meet US President George W. Bush.

Liberia, or the country’s UN peacekeeping force, are now expected to expel him in turn to neighbouring Sierra Leone, where international prosecutors want to try him on 17 charges, including crimes against humanity.

Taylor — a Libyan-trained former guerilla chieftain — is considered the single most powerful figure behind a series of civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone between 1989 and 2003, which left around 400,000 people dead.

Prosecutors at Sierra Leone’s UN-backed Special Court allege he sponsored the brutal rebels of the Revolutionary United Front as they slaughtered, maimed, raped and enslaved tens of thousands of civilians during the 1990s.

The Special Court has drawn up a 17-count charge sheet alleging crimes against humanity, murder, sexual violence and unlawful use of child soldiers.

The call for extradition is supported by the United States, the United Nations and various international human rights organizations.

As a rebel army was closing in on Taylor’s capital Monrovia in August 2003, west African leaders saw an opportunity to bring Liberia’s latest 14-year-old bout of bloodshed to an end by persuading him to flee to Nigeria.

Until Monday’s disappearance, Taylor had lived in exile in a plush riverside villa in the southeastern city of Calabar, where he was ostensibly under close surveillance by Nigerian police and security agents.

FACE-SAVING: The United States praised Nigeria for capturing fugitive Charles Taylor, as visiting Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo denied negligence in handling the exiled former Liberian leader.